enderness; experience had drawn only noble
lines upon her face, and there was an ever-increasing warmth and
graciousness of countenance which was infinitely finer than the bloom of
youth. People made a great deal of youth, but really, when you came to
think of it, what a meagre, paltry thing it was! A man hardly began to
live before he was thirty-five!

"Uncle Dan, may we come in?"

The door flew open, and two young persons, with all the disabilities of
youth upon their heads, came rustling in upon the old bachelor's
misanthropic reverie. Instantly the atmosphere had changed.

"It was very good fun," May remarked, as she perched upon the arm of her
uncle's chair. "They shrieked _Margherita_ and _Santa Lucia_ and a lot
of opera airs, till we thought we should lose our tympanums, and so we
came away."

"We were in quite as much danger of losing our manners," Pauline
interposed. "We sat next a delicious English girl, pretty as a picture
and unresponsive as a statue, and we simply dragged her into
conversation. She took us for English and was terribly shocked to find
we were Americans, and not even Canadians at that. 'You don't mean to
say that you come from the States!' she cried, quite forgetting that she
was a statue. And then May got wicked, as she always does when her
patriotism is touched."

"Nonsense!" May broke in; "it isn't patriotism; it's self-respect."

"And how did you work off your self-respect?" asked Uncle Dan, deeply
interested.

"I told her I thought it was very strange that English people should
mistake us. That we never mistook them; we knew at a glance a person
from the Isles. She rose to it like a tennis-ball, and asked what isles
I referred to. 'Why, the British Isles,' I answered, innocently. And
then she looked mystified, and Pauline discovered that the noise was
very fatiguing, and we came away."

For half-an-hour Uncle Dan listened, highly diverted, to the chatter of
the girls, and it never once occurred to him to remember the meagreness
and paltriness of their condition. After they had left him, he turned to
the window, feeling that the dreariness without and within was a very
transitory and inconsequent thing. And lo! a change had come. The influx
of youth would appear to have put to flight other clouds than those of a
morbid mind. The rain had altogether ceased. He could see the roses
gleaming moistly in the circles of electric light. The serenaders were
just pushing away in their big